Tuesday 26 February, 5.15-6.30pm

Old Library, All Soul's College

Nupur Patel (Lincoln) – ‘Deconstructing Modesty: The Dames des Roches and the Notion of pudeur in Sixteenth-Century France’

First emerging in his 1542 translation of Juan Luis Vives’ Livre de L’Institution de la Femme Chrestienne, Jean de Changy enforces a strikingly gendered interpretation of pudeur or modesty. Indeed, as an oppressive term that is often deployed by male writers supposedly to protect the modesty of women and their bodies, pudeur, I argue, may be reclaimed differently by women themselves. This paper delves into the implications of pudeur with specific reference to women’s writing in sixteenth-century France. By analyzing varying shifts, tonalities and voices that are heard operating both within dialogic subgenres and in specific places, I will examine how far women’s literary works accompany and counter meanings of pudeur in circulation. Using the mother-daughter duo from Poitiers, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches, as a case study, a number of nuanced moves may be unearthed regarding the creation of subcultures of modesty and the ways in which women writers may empower the female body. In their joint works, Les Œuvres, Les Secondes Œuvres and Les Missives, the des Roches women uncover an agency that does not sit neatly with the categories of ‘submissive’ and ‘subversive’, traditionally employed by second-wave feminist scholarship. By using pudeur as a medium of inquiry, we may redefine our understandings of early modern women, taking into account the wide range of positions employed against the backdrop of patriarchal oppression.

Rachel Benoit (Oriel) – ‘Stillborn: the misconceived child in Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner’

In the works of Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner reproductive imagery and bodies are repeatedly doomed to failure. In Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! historical facts and events are either notably absent or farcically spectacularised. Instead, private desires and hypothesized realities drive the narrative reality, destabilizing dominant literary modes of writing History. In both texts, the reader is lead through staged misreadings of actual events as the protagonist and the narrative compulsively revisit desired but unrealized events. Incest, sterility, and imagery of the dead child repeatedly interfere and spawn an obsessive focus on the tense relationships between what is, what was and what could have been. Contextualized by the French 1848 Provisional Government’s failed attempts to unify a splintered peuple with a rhetoric of Bourgeois family values, and the role of the family and ‘breeding’ in the articulation of the paternalistic ‘plantation myth’ during the Antebellum and Reconstruction periods in the American South, Faulkner and Flaubert’s convolution of reproductive imagery will be read as their rejection of, as Baudelaire put it in 1855, ‘la philosophie du progrès’. Reading Flaubert and Faulkner together brings into relief the full breadth of this imagery, and the extent to which their grappling with History unfolds at the syntactical level.

Tuesday 12 February
5.15-6.30pm, Old Library, All Soul's College

Marie Daouda (Oriel) – ‘Baudelaire's desperate prayer - Hoping against Hugo’

Something has gone wrong in 1848. Following the Revolution, the fall of the Second Republkic and the institution of the Second Empire, Victor Hugo is exiled, and poets of the younger generation feel bereft of the revolutionary and the poetical ideal he embodied. Yet, his influence is all the more vivid that he still stood for a humanist ideal, merging a Rousseauist belief in innate human goodness and daring poetic experiments. If Baudelaire strives to emulate Hugo's ability to break the accepted aesthetical codes, his dissent towards the master crystalises around the idea of original sin. 

My aim is to show to what extent Baudelaire's despair faces the problem of evil by admitting it as part of a wider harmony, which he dissociates from Nature, and in which he sees a matchless balance of the opposites. Baudelaire's metaphysics, indebted to Pascal and Joseph de Maistre, admit the pit, the splenetic void, as a space for despair, but in which the poet's desperate prayer enters in a contemplative dialogue with the ideal. 

Jessica Rushton (Oriel) – ‘An exploration of olfaction in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud’

Smells, perfumes, odours and stenches emanate from the works of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Olfaction is an indispensable component in the creation of their poetry. This paper begins with Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s poems which foreground disgusting smells in order to deal with the writing of poetry, society’s corruption and the notions of beauty. It then investigates the poems that deal more explicitly with perfume and its relation to memory and the imagination. This paper will also reveal why the theme of olfaction is rarely the central focus in scholarship devoted to two extensively studied poets, despite Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s unmistakeable foregrounding of olfaction in their poetry.

Tuesday 29 January
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Charlotte Mackay (University of Melbourne) – ‘Aquatic Africas: An ecocritical reading of water symbolism in Léonora Miano’s Les aubes écarlates’

Ecocriticism, broadly defined as “the relationship between literature and the physical environment”, emerged in the Anglo-American milieu in the 1980s and has only recently been applied to the texts of authors originating from formerly colonised territories across the developing world. From the intersection of ecocritical and postcolonial studies was born ecocritical postcolonial studies. This field considers the relationship between the natural environment in all its forms and colonial pasts - memories, traumas and vestiges that have profoundly marked both physically and psychically postcolonial spaces and imaginaries. Ecocritical postcolonial work in Sub-Saharan Africa has tended to focus on the texts of Anglophone white authors neglecting those of black authors all while recognising the need to expand the critical scope to include the region’s abundant Francophone literature. In this paper, I propose to consider the work of a young Cameroonian author, Léonora Miano, through an ecocritical reading of her 2009 novel Les aubes écarlates [Scarlet dawns]. In this novel, Miano integrates the natural elements of her Equatorial African home space as witnesses to the “ignored wounds of the African soul” scarred by the aftereffects of slavery and colonisation whose traumas continue to resonate in the postcolonial era. The author is particularly attentive to water in its numerous manifestations that she erects across her text as a lieu de mémoire for painful pasts and namely that of the Middle Passage. If water is invariably associated in this text with dislocation and death, Miano also invests it with regenerating and federating qualities which enable her to reunite around a common history and memory Africa and her dispersed diasporas on the other side of the Atlantic.

Demystifying the DPhil and Beyond: A Graduate & ECR Roundtable

French Graduate Seminar

Hilary 2019

5.15pm-6.30pm, The Hovenden Room, All Soul’s College

Week 3 (Tuesday 29^th January)

Charlotte Mackay (University of Melbourne) – Aquatic Africas: An ecocritical reading of water symbolism in Léonora Miano’s Les aubes écarlates

Demystifying the DPhil and Beyond: A Graduate and ECR Q&A

Week 5 (Tuesday 12^th February)

Marie Daouda (Oriel) – Baudelaire's desperate prayer: hoping against Hugo?

Jessica Rushton (Oriel) – An exploration of olfaction in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud

Week 7 (Tuesday 26^th February)

Nupur Patel (Lincoln) – Deconstructing Modesty: The Dames des Roches and the Notion of pudeur in Sixteenth-Century France

Rachel Benoit (Oriel) – Stillborn: the misconceived child in Gustave Flaubert and William Faulkner

Tuesday 20 November
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Jasmine Cooper (New College, Cambridge) – ‘An Exploration of Queer Childlessness in Contemporary French Women's Writing’

When we talk about LGBT+ parenting, we are always already talking within  a context of privilege – a first-world context. Despite some remarkable  gains for the queer community, primarily in Western democracies, basic  human rights and attaining a political legitimacy and visibility are not yet universal complacencies that we can boast as a global community.

Looking through an intersectional framework, I am interested in the emergent voices which articulate the anxieties of what not becoming a  mother / parent would mean. Given the ongoing normalisation and growing  potential of queer couples to access (although not always, and not in every country) fertility treatment, I am interested in how a latent fear of childlessness operates within queer stories and struggles of  “wanting” to become a mother. One argument might be that with more  rights and access to becoming a parent, queer couples are now able to  fulfil a “natural” desire for children; yet an emphasis on the natural  desire of becoming a parent sidesteps the issue of challenging a notion  of naturalised desire to reproduce in all subjects. If condemnation to childlessness was once the queer condition and fear of childlessness was/is a heterosexual anxiety, then we can see quite clearly how it is  that queer parenting is moving towards a heterosexual model of deriving  legitimacy from within the family and all of the constructs that the family portends (kinship, inheritance, nationhood, etc.). This move from condemnation to fear reveals an insidious aspect of agency, which is tied up in questions of legitimacy and social currency that still turn  on the axes of children and reproduction. I look at childlessness and  the question of (in)fertility, reproductive technologies and the queer experience of these phenomena in two novels by French writers:  Désorientale by Négar Djavadi (2016) and Gabrielle by Agnès Vannouvong (2015) to explore these questions.

Katie Pleming (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) – ‘Reading the Body with Deleuze in the Films of Marguerite Duras’

What is the value of re-interrogating our immediate, direct, often  inarticulable experience of a the world, the text or the artwork? How  can we in turn “read” those initial responses, and what can those  responses tell us about our conception of our own faculties? This paper seeks to respond to questions regarding the link between  spectatorship, experimental cinema, and Deleuzean philosophy. At the  same time, it looks at questions raised by a historical reading of  Duras’s cinematic work: namely, what might Duras’s filmmaking moment have to do with the strategies of representation she puts to work? I’ll  be looking at these questions through the prism of the viewing mode Duras’s films invite, thinking about the challenges Duras’s bodies pose to readerly or spectatorial hermeneutic impulses. At the same time, I  will attempt to respond to one obvious question: why Deleuze for thinking the challenges represented by Duras’s bodies?

Tuesday 6 November
5.15-6.30pm, Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Dr. Hugues Marchal (Assistant Professor, University of Basel) - 'Jacques Delille (1738-1813), poète de la performance?, Défis et enjeux d'une histoire de la récitation orale'

Tout au long de sa carrière, Delille s’est distingué comme un lecteur hors norme de ses propres vers. Dans le cadre privé des salons et demeures particulières, comme dans le cadre public des grandes institutions où il est appelé à réciter (Académie, Collège de France, Lycée), Delille émerveille, au point de recevoir le surnom de « dupeur d’oreilles ». On se bat pour l’avoir chez soi, les séances publiques sont prises d’assaut (on parle de centaines de personnes restant à la porte), les étrangers de passage tentent de ne pas quitter Paris sans l’avoir entendu. Partout l’assistance applaudit, crie, pleure, etc., et ces lectures, qui jouent un rôle essentiel dans la renommée du poète, ont encore la particularité de diffuser longtemps à l’avance des fragments d’oeuvres encore inédites, car Delille commence à en lire des extraits jusqu’à 25 ans avant la publication – ce qui explique une boutade de Gilbert : c’est un poète dont, paradoxalement, « on récite déjà les vers qu’il fait encore ». Or, bien qu’une telle pratique de l'oralité n’ait rien d’exceptionnel dans la vie littéraire de son temps, le statut de virtuose hors norme accordé à Delille a conduit les contemporains à consacrer de très nombreux textes à ses lectures : un vaste corpus de témoignages, dans la presse, les correspondances, les journaux intimes, voire la fiction, s’y rapportent, et cet ensemble offre un matériel privilégié, et jusque là quasiment pas étudié, pour suivre et tenter de reconstituer une forme non écrite de pratique culturelle, relevant de la performance. Dans mon intervention, c’est donc sur ces lectures – qui se sont étalées sur plus de soixante ans – que j’aimerais me concentrer, pour soulever diverses questions méthodologiques. 

French Graduate Seminar

Michaelmas 2018

5.15pm-6.30pm, The Hovenden Room, All Soul’s College

Week 3 (Tuesday 23^rd October)

Alison Marmont (University of Southampton) – (In)Visible "Others" in the Hexagon: Defying (Mis)Representation and its Consequences for Racialised Women in Linda Lê's Voix and Marie NDiaye's Mon coeur à l'étroit

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln) –  The Self-Translation of Personal Pronouns in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy 

Week 5 (Tuesday 6th November)

Hugues Marchal (Assistant Professor, University of Basel) – Jacques Delille (1738-1813), poète de la performance?, Défis et enjeux d'une histoire de la récitation orale 

Week 7 (Tuesday 20^th November)

Jasmine Cooper (New College, Cambridge) - An Exploration of Queer Childlessness in Contemporary French Women's Writing

Katie Pleming (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) – Reading the Body with Deleuze in the Films of Marguerite Duras